Comment

A carnage of local culture

The virus known as economic rationalism has infected Britain's pub industry. By the time the disease has taken control, much of the environment that so eloquently defines British culture and character will have been destroyed.

Each year more than 250 traditional pubs are closed or redeveloped. The scale of the devastation is such that less than half of British villages now have a local. What was once a vital community hub has now become an endangered species.

The carnage must be brought to a halt. Pubs have played a uniquely pivotal role in British history and they should be preserved. Throughout the 18th century they played host to Britain's great social and political reform movements. In the 19th century they became a centre for sport, art and literature. Many chapters in our national narrative have been written across a porter-strewn bar table.

The great fantasy writers of the last century - JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and others - chewed over their novels in the back room of the Eagle & Child in Oxford. The conversations that took place there profoundly influenced the development of 20th-century English literature.

The list stretches endlessly. Watson and Crick first publicly announced the discovery of the structure of DNA at their local, the Eagle in Cambridge. Dylan Thomas met his future wife Caitlin over a drink at London's Wheatsheaf. The Leopard Inn at Burslem was where Wedgwood and Brindley met to agree on the building of the Trent to Mersey canal, spearheading Britain's golden age of canals, revolutionising freight transport and giving impetus to the industrial revolution.

Almost every great music act made its debut in a pub, many of which are now gone for ever. The Football Association was formed at London's Freemason's Tavern, now destroyed. The Riley Arms in Stoke-on-Trent, where Phil "The Power" Taylor, 12 times world darts champion, played his first games and where he first became serious about the sport, was closed down last year.

The list of defunct pubs reads like an obituary to British history. The Bridgewater Arms, Manchester, which in 1824 was birthplace of the Manchester Mechanics Institute, later to become Manchester University, was demolished in the 1940s. The Feathers Tavern in Cheapside, where the London Infirmary, springboard for the great health reforms of the 18th century, was founded, has gone the same way.

Of course part of this trend can be attributed to broader social and economic changes. People drink at home more often these days, and some are inclined to spend their leisure time in restaurants. But those shifts cannot alone account for the systematic closure of so many pubs. The answer lies in recent management changes within the pub economy.

Until recently there had always been a healthy symbiosis between pub and brewery. Breweries owned an estate of pubs, and it was in the breweries' interests to ensure their survival. Then in 1989 the Tory government, in an attempt to break the brewers' stranglehold, introduced legislation to open up the market for pub ownership.

Under these laws, no brewery could own more than 2,000 pubs. The average brewery estate was then around 10,000 pubs and, although the laws were later repealed, many breweries were forced to divest 80% of their properties, placing them hastily on the open market and taking on the role of product supplier rather than patron or manager.

Property-management companies wasted no time filling the void. Most cared little about their new acquisitions, seeing them as nothing more than an opportunity for redevelopment and resale. For the next 15 years, pubs were bought and sold in blocks of several hundred, most being acquired by investment companies. The activity has been ferocious. Punch Taverns, for example, doubled its acquisitions between 2003 and 2006, and now owns one in six British pubs - almost 10,000 of them.

The modern pub manager is largely powerless to make decisions that would either reflect local needs or reinforce the pubs' own unique image and history.

The Campaign for Real Ale, in conjunction with academics at the London School of Economics, has launched a campaign to raise awareness of these issues. The initiative, Pubs in Time, is placing plaques in pubs of special historical significance, in the hope of reversing the pernicious trends of the past few decades.

We hear so much talk of what it means to be British. We debate the meaning of national identity and cultural integrity. Now we have an opportunity and a responsibility to do something meaningful. The faceless finance vandals must be brought to account.

· Simon Davies is a visiting fellow in information systems at the London School of Economics and is national coordinator of Pubs in Time. Email: s.g.davies@lse.ac.uk